I.
Introduction and Acknowledgements

Deriving
volume estimates for
the objects and spacecraft we see is a troublesome task, especially for
curvy TNG-era Trek ships. Even Star Destroyers, which are
basically just pyramids, have enough extra features and notches to
thwart all but the most skilled volume estimators. While it
would
be virtually impossible to do by
hand, though, it can be done quite well by
computer.
Raytracing
programs have been around for a long time, but as the technology and
internet
have improved the online CGI modeling community has grown and shared
its models. Hundreds of extraordinary
meshes are available these days from the vigorous and talented modeling
community, and a good many of
them are of sci-fi ships.

Since
this page was originally conceived and created, the technology has come
a long way. Though free programs like POV-Ray have been
around since the DOS era, there were limits to what it could do.
Thus
using CGI models to get volume estimates required tools such
as areavol
for Lightwave,
with the latter being a very expensive and professional product.
However, one can now do volumetric analysis without LightWave or any
other
expensive
modeler. Google Sketchup has had a lot of
starship models made for
it. And, with a volume plugin found here,
you can get far better estimates of a ship's volume than you can by
simply guessing at simpler shapes. More adventurous folks can
try their hand at Blender's unique interface and use
of the volume calculation script found here.

Any
such estimates are obviously rough estimates only . . . a model is not
the
"real" thing, and variances will occur with even the best-looking mesh
of polygons. Indeed, lower-poly models may even be
preferable, since high-detail models can have overlaps, leaks, and
other issues that skew the results, though some of the higher-detail
guys are the same ones who so kindly clean out the interior of their
models. Of course you
don't want to go too undetailed . . . calculating the surface area of a
perfect sphere will put
you in the ballpark of the surface area of the hull of the Death Star,
for
instance. However, as anyone who's seen Star Wars can tell
you, the Death
Star's surface isn't perfectly flat and
featureless. The level of
detail on the model, then, can make a large difference in the results
obtained.

The above having been said, any data from just about any model
is
going to be far superior to what someone could come up with on paper.

Masao Okasaki of the exquisite Starfleet
Museum (Enterprise,
the way it should've been) was kind
enough to provide me with some of that data
as originally compiled by
Nob
Akimoto, a poster
to the TrekBBS, using 3D Studio Max software. The volume and
surface area measurements were
based on meshes whose design length corresponds to the ship lengths
given by
Bernd Schneider's Ex
Astris
Scientia starship database. In addition,
reader "D-Five" has also provided an amazing amount of LightWave
assistance with
this page, including providing some data for Star Wars vessels,
confirming many of Nob Akimoto's values within a reasonable
margin of variability. (An exception was the Excelsior, which
based on comparison with the TMP Constitution was
simply too small in the Akimoto list; its data has been replaced
below.) The TMP
nacelle information comes from "The
Red Admiral". And, yours truly has done a
lot of work
based on Google SketchUp and related models.

II.
How to Use the Chart

A.
Nomenclature

Also,
you'll see after certain vessel classes that appear more than once an A
or B. This is based on Captain Picard's use of the term
"B-type
Warbird", which happened to coincide with the first appearance of the
second Warbird studio model, which had different features from the
first. This also works nicely given that the Enterprise-B is
the
first known vessel of the modified Excelsior class (with the secondary
hull 'wing' additions and so on), meaning that the B-type Excelsior
refers to the Enterprise-B, as well as merely referring to a second
type of Excelsior.

As a result, obviously, the A-type
Constitution is the TOS vessel. The B-type Constitution is
the
TMP (movies) version. The parallel universe ship from the
2009
movie onwards is referred to here as the Monsterprise of the
Alt-stitution Class. (No hate . . . it's just a huge ugly
ship
and easier to distinguish that way.)

B.
Scales

For the most part, the lengths of ships correspond to EAS,
but there have been a few occasions where I
made a
judgement call based either on my own scalings or on choosing a
different
compromise of contradictory scalings than Bernd. The
important
thing, however, is the model shape, since (if you've read Volumetrics
101) you know that it's a simple matter to get a new volume
when length
is adjusted.

C.
Provided Data

In the following, I provide the aforementioned length
estimates
along with the surface area and volume data for ships of that size and
design. Again, these are approximations only, and unless
specifically marked
otherwise I consider the ships to be valid representations and thus the
values
should be within a few percentage
points. However,
your cubic
meterage may vary.

Also
provided is the surface area for some of the ships, to give a sense of
the hull area. That said, I'm not sure how detailed some of
the other starship meshes were, which might
affect the surface area part of the table somewhat. For
instance, the TOS
Constitution is almost invariably modelled with a very smooth surface
(much like
the original filming models), whereas one might wish to put every
little odd
giblet, nook, and cranny from the Intrepid sensor suites on one's
Intrepid model, which
could significantly drive up the ship's surface
area. Thus, I
wouldn't suggest trying to be too precise when drawing comparisons
between the
surface area of two different ships.

To
my knowledge, Google SketchUp is not that useful for determining
surface area of ships. Thus, most SketchUp vessels are not
represented with
surface area numbers.

I also provide some other extraneous minutiae. The
first bit of minutiae is listed as
"Venator Volume", and is intended as a comparison to the volume
of the Venator Class Star Destroyer seen in Revenge of the Sith
and extensively in The
Clone Wars,
having become for me the most familiar Star Destroyer. Next
comes
a comparison to the Constitution Class (TOS) ship in multiples of the
1701
volume. The same is done for the Falcon, rounding
out a
decent comparison set against better-known vessels.

There is also
the
volume coefficient,
suggested in the
Volumetrics 101
article by BHMM. It is basically a comparison of the ship's
true volume with a cube of the same length, so long skinny-looking
ships will have a low one and wide, tall, beefy-looking ships will have
a high one. Then we have "V/SA" and the reverse, which gives
a comparison
value
between the volume and surface area of the vessels . . . not all that
useful
necessarily, and I may drop it if I don't see a use for it soon.

And finally, I offer an estimated metric tonnage, based on the
starship
volumes and comparison with known tonnage. The Star
Trek
values are based on statements of mass of Constitution Class and
Intrepid Class ships, which due to very different densities serve as an
upper and lower range based off two
mass statements. More on this very interesting data
can be
found here.
I'm also providing rough estimates for Star Wars vessel
masses,
rounded. These are based on calculations and data explained
in
more detail here.

D.
Final Notes

Star Wars vessel data appears at the top of the
list. First come the two Death
Stars, then other vessels in rough size order, listed by
popularly accepted name. Next comes Federation
starship data, listed in order by popularly accepted class
names.
Then come shuttles, stations, and adversary ships.

There is some symbology below. Vessels with a "~" in
front of their values are based on
models I find
to be very questionable representations, such as my use of sphere data
for the
Death Stars. Asterisk-laden class/vessel names are using
values from the original Nob Akimoto TrekBBS data.

Note links precede many of the class names for
more
explanation and commentary, and links to SketchUp models are given
where applicable.

Where
necessary, I have rounded the volume comparison numbers to keep the
number of characters down and the colums small, so larger numbers have
fewer digits after the decimal or none at all. Also, I've used a
sort of scientific notation for larger numbers, using "E6" and E9" to
refer to millions and billions, respectively, rather than using varying
powers (e.g. E8, et cetera). Seemed simpler.

The first,
smaller masses in the list above were obtained from dividing the
700,000 tons by Voyager's volume, and then applying that density to all
the
other ship volumes. The result of the division was
approximately
1.11842, which implies that the density of the Intrepid Class starship
should be
just 1,118.42 kg/m³, roughly (and intentionally) corresponding to the
density of the Apollo capsules per TrekBBS posts by Rick
Sternbach.

A similar density for the Delta Flyer can be derived from
"Thirty Days"[VOY5]. The Delta Flyer
is used to go to the center of an artificially-maintained water sphere
in
space. The center is said to be over 600km deep,
and the residents
of the water sphere have never gone there due to the
pressure.
The Delta Flyer goes down there easily, but loses immersion shields and
propulsion and thus must float back up.

Can the water density at such a depth be
determined, thus giving us some indication of the Flyer's
density?
There are possibilities. The water sphere had a
device in the center
which somehow offered containment via artificial gravity.
Whether this
acted like a natural gravity well or projected a containment field at
the
surface is unclear. Assuming it was the latter, though, we
can make
some
very rough calculations. A 1200km sphere of water will mass
approximately 9.05E20kg,
or about 1/6600th of Earth's mass. The sphere should thus
have a
surface
gravity of about 0.16773 m/s,
so at a depth of 600km the pressure would be about 100 megapascals, or
almost a
thousand times normal Earth atmospheric pressure. This is
roughly
equivalent to the pressure at about ten kilometers below sea level on
Earth (and
it doesn't
get much
deeper). At such a pressure, the density of water
becomes
higher, approaching 1100 kg/m³. To
float back up, the Flyer had to rid itself of non-essential equipment .
. . this
might suggest that the flyer's normal density is probably similar to
that of
Voyager.

If, on the other hand, the central containment
device acted more like a normal gravity well, then based on a simple
depth model
of our own ocean at 30 degrees latitude, even a chilly 100km depth
would've
produced a water density of over 1300 kg/m³, and a pressure of 1,500
megapascals..

Those two values serve as very rough lower and
upper bounds for the Flyer's density. It isn't clear, though,
whether
these values would work for other shuttlecraft . . . the Flyer has
several
Borg-inspired systems, a hull composed of tetraburnium instead of the
normal
tritanium or duranium, and so on. However, it is
nonetheless a
potential supporting fact.

Density Results:

Voyager

1,118.42
kg/m³

Delta
Flyer

~1,100
to 1,300 kg/m³

2.
The Constitution Class

The second, larger masses in the table above used a similar
method
based on a different comment altogether:

"Almost a million gross
tons of vessel, depending on a hunk of crystal
the size of my fist."
- Chief
Engineer Montgomery Scott, "Mudd's Women"[TOS1]

a.
Gross Tons

Scotty's statement is a curious one . . . gross tonnage
generally
isn't a unit of mass at
all in the naval context. The best
jargon-free definition would be the one I found here,
where the following is stated:

"A Gross ton is not, as some would expect, a unit
of weight. Rather it is a marine term equal to 100 cubic feet
[...] used to describe the size of vessel. Gross tonnage
indicates the internal volume of a vessel, including cargo holds and
other areas, while net tonnage is the commercially useful internal
capacity of the ship, that is, gross tonnage less the crew quarters,
engine rooms, and so on."

As noted above,
the volume of the ship is estimated to be 211,248 cubic
meters. That's 7,460,152
cubic feet. The ship should therefore be about
74,600 gross tons,
not even close to "nearly a million".

One solution would
be to accept Scotty's statement and take the ship to be a helluva lot
bigger . .
. but we can't do that. Not only do we get a good
sense of the
ship's scale from the windows, the TMP hull-walking scene, various
comparative graphics (such as the one in Keiko's classroom on DS9) and
so on, but we also have a direct sizing of
the ship (in feet) from "The Enterprise Incident"[TOS2]:

There's just no way the ship should be
ballooned out to the length that would be required to give her nearly a
million gross tons of
volume. The images above constrain us to the low-to-mid 900s,
in feet . .
. or around 289 meters. Had Scotty meant to imply
that the volume-based gross tonnage were about 900,000, then the ship
would have 900,000,000 cubic feet of volume. That's
25,485,161.9 cubic meters. Using the volume
coefficient based on 289 meters and 211,248m³, then the Constitution
Class would have to come in at 1,428 meters, or over 4,700
feet. That's well above any estimate for the vessel, and
given Picard's direct statement that the Enterprise-E was almost 700
meters long, it would put the Constitution at over twice the length of
the Sovereign Class. Obviously taking the gross tonnage as a
volume statement is not the way to go.

There is, however, a solution.
The Imperial weight scheme features the "gross hundredweight" or "long
hundredweight". Twenty of these are equal to a "gross ton" or
(as it is more commonly known) a "long ton", equal to 2,240 pounds
(1,016kg). References here,
here,
here,
et cetera.

Besides serving as an argument for the
immediate adoption of the metric system in both normal and naval
affairs to avoid all this damned confusion of similar terms having
totally different meanings, this also happens to mean that Scotty's
statement was not in error. The Enterprise was indeed nearly
a million gross (or long) tons in mass. If we
assumed that "nearly a
million" equalled 900,000 gross tons, then the ship's mass would be
914,442
metric tonnes, and her density would be 4,329kg/m³.

The Star Trek non-canon has featured different mass
estimates for NCC-1701. One of the more popular has been a
figure of
190,000 metric tonnes, which originally appeared in the writer's guide
(much like a 1.5 million tonne figure for Voyager). The
190,000 tonne
figure, however, appeared well before the design of the ship was
finalized, and
before a final size had been chosen. (One of the
early Enterprise
concepts had the ship as being 200 feet long, and even shortly before
the first
pilot the ship was thought to be around 500 feet
long.)

Nonetheless the figure persisted, due in part to
its inclusion in Whitfield's 1968 "The Making of Star Trek" which made
it easy to find and reference in an age before DVDs and
VCRs. From
there it made its way into Franz Joseph's Technical Manual, and from
there into
many other materials. Some newer non-canon materials such as
the DS9TM
have supported the canon mass by showing TMP-era vessels as having high
densities, but others such as Starship Spotter
continue to use the fandom
figure.

At 190,000 tonnes, the TOS Enterprise would be 90%
as dense as water . . . that is to say, the ship would float.
Voyager, a ship designed to
land and which is explicitly identified as being fast and nimble, would
be 133%
denser. That's 136,000 metric tonnes
extra. This, of course,
makes little sense . . . one would expect Voyager to be as light as
possible,
with probably the smallest density in the fleet. Otherwise
they could just
slap landing legs (or pontoons, for that matter) on an old Miranda
class and go on about their business. There's also the oddity of the
idea of the Enterprise being only 75% as dense as the Apollo command
modules.

Some proponents of Trek fandom deride Scotty's canon
comment as "anomalous". Others claim that Scotty
was engaged in hyperbole (albeit a minimal example) because, they say,
he was exasperated. In general, such 'fandom-boys'
claim priority due to 35+ years of
non-canon materials which have persisted with the erroneous
figure.
Further, it's claimed that the "Mudd's Women" statement was an error
by the writer, listed in the credits as Stephen Kandel, and it's also
claimed that Roddenberry personally reviewed the Franz Joseph
repetition of the writer's guide figure and signed off on it.

Such arguments are flawed in multiple ways.
First, the lone canon example from TOS is not an anomaly, by
definition, since there is nothing canon to compare it
to. Second, Scotty's tone and demeanor . . . not to
mention the reaction of Kirk and Spock . . . hardly qualifies the
statement as one of Scotty freaking out and exaggerating
things. See the behavior here:

Third, an error that persists does not become more
correct the longer it lasts. It simply becomes an older, more
oft-repeated
error. Given that the mass is stated in
the show as "almost a million gross
tons", it is rather silly to then claim 190,000 tonnes. This would be
like deciding Voyager's
mass was 1.5 million tonnes (as per the writer's guide) despite clear
contrary statements in the show. It just doesn't happen for the 90's
show, so why would one do it for the 60's show?

Finally, the TOS writers did not operate in a vacuum . . .
Roddenberry's rewrites and the oversight by the writing team (with
occasional input from Rand engineers) were
well-known. Further, as reported in Star Trek
Creator (p. 285), the writing credits submitted to the Writer's Guild
for "Mudd's Women" read "Story by Gene Roddenberry; teleplay by Stephen
Kandel, John D.F. Black, Gene Roddenberry". Roddenberry also
attempted to charge Desilu for a "polish" of the story. Thus,
there is no question on the matter of authorship and validity . . .
Roddenberry was directly involved in the script which described the
ship as being almost a million gross tons.

There has been one other incident wherein
we received
detailed ship data, though it has too many problems to be very
useful.
Note the following graphic from Star Trek II:

As you can see, a freighter of that period could
mass at least 147,943 metric tons, or 147,943,000 kilograms, when
loaded.
Unfortunately, we don't know anything about the ship's
volume. We
have the length, width, and height, but that has little
meaning.
Only the Borg make ships which are blocky enough to actually fill a box
based on
their length, width, and height.

Add
to that the fact that we have a situation not unlike the "gross tons"
above. "Dead Weight Tonnage" doesn't refer to the
mass of the ship,
though this is a common misconception. It actually refers to
the difference in mass between a ship when fully
loaded and when empty. However, since we also have the cargo capacity
in metric tons, this seems a peculiar redundancy, and given the
difference of 50,000
metric tons it also would seem to be a peculiar discrepancy.
On the other hand, the additional 50,943 metric tons (over and above
the cargo) could refer to ship's additional operating equipment,
stores, the 300 passengers and their effects, the 81 crew and their
effects, deuterium, and so on . . . even though that seems like an
awful lot. It does not refer to the superstructure,
propulsion systems, and so on, if it really is dead weight tonnage. In
any case, using the 147,943 metric ton figure as ship's mass is
actually quite conservative, since that figure (if used properly) would
not include the actual mass of the ship, but simply the mass of cargo,
personnel, et cetera. The actual mass of the ship when loaded would be
far
greater.

Still, the main problem with the Kobayashi
Maru . . . besides being fictitious, even in the fictitious Trek
universe . . .
is that we never get to see the design of the ship.
Is it really a
237 x 111 x 70 box? Or is it a 237 meter long,
two-meter wide
cylinder with some slender 34 meter long appendages on the top and
bottom, and
some slender 54.5 meter long appendages on the
side? We have no way
to know. As a result, all we can do is guess at the density
of the ship.

In "I, Borg"[TNG5], the Enterprise
discovers a crashed Borg scout vessel. Riker, Worf, and
Crusher beam down
and find a Borg cube that appears to be approximately the size of a
small
house. Only one of the five crew survived.

Later, what Data describes as "a scout ship
similar to the one that crashed" comes to the area to find the crashed
ship. Data reads its mass as 2.5 million
tonnes. Even if
we assume that the crashed vessel is much bigger than what we saw on
the planet
. . . some buried in rock or spread around elsewhere on the surface . .
. the
small crew does place certain limits on its size given normal Borg crew
densities.

But at 2.5 million metric tons, the ship would have
a mass over three times that of Voyager. Unless we
try to make the
ship ridiculously large, this must imply a very high density.

We know from "Endgame"[VOY7] that Borg
hulls use tritanium, and this is also used for the infrastructure of
their
tactical drones ("Dark Frontier"[VOY5]).

What else do we know of tritanium?
Well, we also know that natural veins of tritanium ore are 21.4 times
as hard as diamond and
well-nigh impossible to break
("Obsession"[TOS]) and virtually impossible to melt ("Arsenal of
Freedom"[TNG2]). (This naturally leads one to wonder how the
hell
they do anything with it, but that's neither here nor
there.)
We know that the material can be alloyed with various other
substances ("Dead Stop"[ENT2], "The Raven"[VOY4], et
cetera). Tritanium alloy is commonly
employed in starship framework/hulls ("Dead Stop"[ENT2]), ship hulls
("The Raven"[VOY4], and Type-6 shuttle hulls
("Rascals"[TNG5]). The interior bulkheads of the Enterprise-D
are also
tritanium in some cases ("Where Silence Has Lease"[TNG2]).

The Borg ship density would imply that tritanium is
very dense.

Also featured on ship hulls is duranium.
The outer hull of NX Class ships was lined with
duranium in the 2150's ("The Xindi"[ENT3]) as insulation.
Duranium was used for the outer shielding of the
warp core on Intrepid Class ships, and would require a sustained phaser
beam to
burn through ("Projections"[VOY2]). Duranium alloy
was considered for reinforcement of
the tritanium shuttle hull in "Threshold"[VOY2], but was thought to be
too brittle for the purpose of transwarp. The hull of Voyager
is at least partially duranium
("Drone"[VOY5], "The Disease"[VOY5]). Duranium was
added at some point to reinforce the hull of the tetraburnium-hulled
Delta Flyer
("Body and Soul"[VOY7]), hence the reading of duranium alloys in
"Once Upon a Time"[VOY5].

Cardassian Nor-type stations use two-meter thick
duranium composite in the construction of their access conduits, making
them
difficult to scan within ("Captive Pursuit"[DSN1], "The
Siege"[DSN2]). Duranium composite is
also used for the rather less-thick hatch doors of
Federation runabouts. Sisko estimated that it would take Kira
an hour to
burn through it with her Bajoran hand phaser
("Q-Less"[DSN1]).
Duranium alloy from a destroyed Klingon Vor'Cha
cruiser's secondary hull had a magnetic field sufficiently strong to
partially
disrupt runabout sensors ("Dramatis Personae"[DSN1]).
Magnasite in a liquid form is a
substance that can eat through the duranium
pins used to hold panels on the walls of DS9 ("Necessary
Evil"[DSN2]).
"Poly-duranium alloy blend" is used on the bridges of Defiant Class
ships. Gallamites were trading partners with the Federation,
supplying duranium for
the war effort ("Penumbra"[DSN7]).

Corridor panels on the Enterprise-D were solid
duranium ("A Matter of
Perspective"[TNG4]). Simple transporter test articles were
made of solid duranium ("Hollow
Pursuits"[TNG5]). TOS shuttle hulls were a duranium
metal
shell ("The
Menagerie"[TOS1]). "Most shuttlecraft hulls are made of
duranium",
according to Geordi in "Final Mission"[TNG5]. Data's skull is
partially composed of
duranium ("The Chase"[TNG]).

For the most part, these datapoints would seem to
support the idea that duranium is rather light, and features pleasing
thermal
conductivity properties.

Based on the density difference between Voyager and
the Enterprise, it's possible that starship densities decline as time
goes by,
presumably due to design improvements, metallurgical advances, and of
course
technological advances in propulsion systems.

Granted, it's dangerous to theorize like this with only two
data
points, since there are plenty of factors which would affect a ship's
mass and
plenty of other differences to look at in regards to the two
ships.
Intrepids, for instance, have tiny nacelles compared to the
Constitutions.
Voyager's nacelles account for less than six percent of the ship's
total volume,
whereas the TOS-era Constitution nacelles account for over a quarter of
the
Enterprise's volume. (The Galaxies, incidentally, feature
nacelles just
under ten percent of the volume of the ship.) The weight
distribution suggested by Voyager's landing legs would seem to go
along with the idea that warp nacelles are very massive objects,
meaning that
the overall density of the Constitution Class Starship may be centered
in the
area of the nacelles.

Also, the datapoints above regarding hull material
densities might also be a clue. Most starships have
been referred to
as having tritanium hulls, whereas Voyager's hull is apparently
duranium. Of course, it's most likely that, as is
the case with
NX-01, both materials are present to some degree. However, if
Voyager's
hull is low in the dense tritanium (or if the tritanium is virtually
absent from
her hull), then it could be that much weight was shed in the design
process by
giving her a less-dense (but probably more thermally insulated) hull.

Then, there is the ship itself. A
larger ship will require increases in hull materials and internal
structural
members that will, as a rule of thumb, increase the vessel's mass far
beyond
what simple scaling by length would suggest. If you
draw a square 10
centimeters in width, a second square of 20 centimeters in width can
easily be
seen to have four times the surface area, despite the fact that you
only doubled
the width. Volume works the same way, only it cubes instead
of squares . .
. a 10cm cube has a volume of 1,000cm³, whereas a 20cm cube has a
volume of
8,000cm³, and a 30cm cube is 27,000cm³! The surface
areas of the
cubes do not rise so quickly . . . 600m², 2,400m², and 5,400m²,
respectively. But, if the ship's hull and
superstructure are some of
the most massive parts of the vessel, it's easy to see how quickly the
mass of
the ship would increase if the ship were larger but built to withstand
the same
sorts of forces.

B.
Star Wars Ship Masses

While working on an old unfinished page I'd forgotten about, I
realized that I really needed a decent estimate of Star Destroyer
mass. Despite not having much to really go on, I
decided to make a
guesstimate. Unless and until we get more
information, it's as good as anything else, if not better.

So,
let us assume that a Star Destroyer is 1600 meters in length.
Now we
need an estimate of the density. We have options here.

1.
Comparison to Star Trek Densities

We
can attempt to use the density of Star Trek vessels.
Something
similar to this move was performed by Mike Wong when estimating the
density of the Millenium Falcon, basing his Falcon mass off of a simple
volume estimation and the Star Trek TNG Technical Manual mass for the
Galaxy Class Enterprise-D, plus an unknown volume estimate of that
ship. We can do a much better job of this, though, with canon
data and more advanced volumetrics.

Star Trek vessels like the Intrepid Class,
for instance, have a density of over 1100 kg/m³.
However, we know that
the vessels are constructed of different materials and so on, so this
is a somewhat dangerous assumption. There's also the fact
that the
Constitution Class ships had a far higher density of over
4300 kg/m³.
However, given that the Intrepid can land as most Star Destroyer
classes seem able to, the Intrepid density seems the safer (albeit
still dangerous) assumption. So this would suggest
1100 kg/m³.

2.
Comparison to Real Spacecraft

We can attempt to use the
density of real-world spacecraft. This is also dangerous, of
course,
since real-world spacecraft are hardly military vessels. They
are
designed to allow people to get to space for a brief period of time,
but can hardly be expected to withstand even a single hostile bullet or
other decent-velocity impact.

Now, it happens that when Star Trek guru Rick Sternbach was
designing the Intrepid Class for Star
Trek: Voyager,
he intentionally based their stated mass off of an estimate of the
ship's volume, calculating the mass via a density derived from an
estimate of the Apollo capsule command module. And indeed,
the
Intrepid density is within about 10-20% of that value, assuming the
Intrepid model used on this site for the estimate is basically the same
as his. However, the command module was basically just the
crew
compartment and heat shield for re-entry, a single part of the combined
Command/Service Module (CSM), with the service module featuring the
large engine bell and other machinery that enabled Earth-Moon transit.

Taking
that combined vehicle massing 30 tonnes and estimating her volume
based on this Google SketchUp model (with or without engine
bell) results in a CSM volume of approximately 80m³.
Prior eyeball estimation based on a 4m diameter and 8m
length,
with 3 of her 11 meters removed to account for the engine bell and
conical front, suggested a volume of 100m³. However, with
just
the bell gone the total CSM length is 8.5 meters, meaning prior eyeball
estimation was off significantly. Thus, 30,332 kilograms
divided
by 79.9 cubic meters gives us 379.6kg/m³ as the approximate
vehicle density. However, given that we are counting the
engine
bell as part of the ship's mass without accounting for its volume, it
may be beneficial to report the overestimated volume's density reading
of 298kg/m³, as well, to give a sense of potential upper and
lower values.

That
seems a bit light, so we
can also compare to the space shuttle orbiter. Empty, a
newer shuttle
like Endeavour weighs about 70 tonnes, and she's about 105 tonnes when
full. At about 37.25m long, 23.75m wide, and 17.25 meters
tall,
she's
a big girl. Determining her density is a little bit of a
trick,
though, since much of her total empty mass . . . not to mention her
width and height . . . is nothing more than wing surfaces and
structure, not to mention her big empty cargo bay. But since
we're ballparking, we can simply take the fuselage as a cylinder and
guesstimate that her wings surfaces could be crushed to fit into the
cargo bay.

So, per estimation from this site,
we have the total length of 37.25 meters. A smidgen of that
is the
vertical stablizer (the tail fin), but we'll just roll with that
figure. Given that the shuttle fuselage is roughly
cylindrical, the
height and width values of about 6 meters are sufficient for diameter
(the crew area and payload bay are below six meters, the rear fuselage
with the engines is over six). So if we ballpark a 35x6
cylinder, we
come up with a total volume of 990m³. Alternately, we can
take this SketchUp model and, adjusting
the size, get a volume plug-in result of 827m³ . . . a big difference,
but not critical for our purposes.

Given her empty and full
masses, the density ranges between 71 and 106kg/m³ for the eyeball
modeling, or 85 to 127kg/m³ for the SketchUp version.

3.
Canon Indicators

Given the extensive use of simple steel even for external
towers
on the Death Star (per the ANH novelization), Coruscant buildings, and
similar, it seems unlikely that durasteel or steelcrete will be
superdense. Even the Invisible Hand used "hydrofoamed
permacrete to
save weight" for some of its walls and bulkheads. And of
course,
given that a natural stone on Yavin was so
dense that no weapon was thought capable of penetrating it, we could be
forgiven in believing that Star Wars ships are built strong but as
light as possible.

That
said, the space shuttle is framed with aluminum for much of it, and
most modern spacecraft are, again, basically built like tin cans.
But interestingly, both the shuttle and vessels of the Clone
Wars
era are built with big empty spaces. For instance,Venators
with their extensive landing bay
areas, the Malevolence with its massive open center railway areas, and
so on . . . and the Death Stars seem little different in that regard.

4.
Conclusion

It
seems that Rick Sternbach's choice was rather on the heavy side
compared to other real spacecraft. The space shuttle tops out
at
around 125kg/m³, the Apollo
CSM 400kg/m³, and the Apollo command module with heat shield by itself
is near 1000kg/m³. And yet the Constitution Class still came
in
four
times more dense than that, and a couple of dozen times denser than the
space
shuttle!

So where should we attempt to put the Star Destroyers?
Considering that large warships of the Clone Wars era seem to be
largely hollow even more than we might expect for simple hallways and
such, I hardly feel comfortable comparing it to an Intrepid Class
ship that has very little empty space by comparison. But I
also
don't want to compare it to a tin can.

Given
a calculated volume of about 54,000,000m³ for Star Destroyers at 1600m
length, and a density range of 500-1000kg/m³, the mass of a Star
Destroyer should fall somewhere between 27,000,000,000 and
54,000,000,000 kilograms. That's 27 to 54 million
metric tonnes.

If
one wants a specific estimate, I'd guess a density of 750kg/m³ and an
ISD mass of 40,000,000 tonnes. However, for the purposes of
the
above chart, we'll give the full range.

V.
Addenda

0. The Death Star
estimates are heavily rounded
above,
because they're for simple spheres (i.e. not counting
trenches, superlasers, surface emplacements, and so on). But
as big as the bloody things are, do we really care? We could
lose the equivalent of tens of thousands of Star Destroyers as a part
of rounding off and not notice.

That said, a pretty cool SketchUp model with interior details
visible (fun to play around with if nothing else) is here.

1. The
Sovereign's length (and volume, as well)
changed in between Insurrection
and Nemesis. The CGI model was
heavily reworked, and basic
details -- nacelle position, pylon angle and thickness, and keel
structure --
were significantly and visibly altered.

Similar issues would occur with other "star" ships, such as
the TOS
Enterprise, Enterprise-D and the Defiant.
In the case of the
Enterprise-D, there was the slender ILM six-foot Enterprise-D, or the
thicker
"Bulldog" four-foot Enterprise-D built by Greg Jein. There
were
also multiple Defiant models, from the main physical model to separate
and
dissimilar CGI models by VisionArt, ILM, and Digital Muse.
The VisionArt
versions were very close to the model, and very high
quality. The
ILM version built for First Contact was quite
good, as well. Then
there was the butt-ugly, long-nosed Digital Muse model (used to
represent the USS
Valiant, as well as the Defiant when she appeared in "Sacrifice of
Angels").

In the case of the Sovereign, we have to assume a refit
occurred. However, the Galaxy and Defiant ships
which would switch
back and forth even within the same episode (thanks to the magic of
stock
footage) have to be assumed to be the same, even though we know
otherwise . . .
unless we want to assume mid-episode refits or inflatable hulls.

2. I agree with
the EAS 120 meter length for the
Defiant, even though
the official line is that she's 170 meters in
length. The vast majority
of visuals support a ~120 meter length for the
ship. (Scaling
anything from DS9 can be a little tricky, however, since David Stipes
chose to
scale things at his dramaturgic whim, while also maintaining a length
list with
extremely peculiar values on it, to say the least.
I do not hold his
work in
high regard as a result. I bet he liked the Big-Nosed
Defiant, too.) More details on
size and scaling issues are available in the EAS Starship Articles
section.

A
Sketchup modelhere
is not perfectly accurate (it appears to be based
on the Star Trek Fact Files inaccurate rendition of the ship), but
nonetheless the volume comes out to about 61,150 cubic meters when
calculated at 5%. That's within tolerances. Another
model here looks
pretty good, except for the slender nose and possibly a too-wide main
hull. Don't bother using the second model for volume work .
. .
it reads a third of what it should.

Remarkably,
the Defiant is 1/16th as voluminous as the Excelsior-B Class Lakota,
yet in "Paradise Lost'[DSN] the two fought to a rough draw.
The
Lakota had been holding back, fighting to disable the Defiant and thus
not using quantum torpedoes, but the Lakota was also in very bad
condition, with the Defiant crew believing her to be one good hit away
from being "finished", killing everyone aboard. To be sure,
shooting to disable increased the degree of difficulty for the Lakota,
but it is still remarkable that the Defiant held up.

3. I'm presuming
that the Nebula is of the standard
type (the
"Sutherland" edition, seen throughout DS9), and not the version with
the Phoenix "AWACS" pod, which was a longer vessel.

4. The
Galaxy Stardrive refers to the entire
Stardrive section
. . . the engineering hull and warp engines as seen when the
Enterprise-D
separates, which by volume is about one third of the combined ship.
I have no idea what the masses are for the
separate parts, but it appears that nacelles should be heavier.
So, take the mass figures for the separated ship with the
suitable grains of salt.

Interestingly,
the Stardrive alone, minus the nacelles, is by volume worth 9.2
Constitutions, minus nacelles. But, she's only worth 1.9
Excelsiors-sans-nacelles. For the Stardrive plus Saucer but
still
minus nacelles, the figures are 33.8 and almost exactly 7.

The
Galaxy Class USS Odyssey, without shields, was forced to withdraw by
three Jem'Hadar attack ships. That should give a sense of the
technology level and combat-oriented nature of the Jem'Hadar ships,
given that by volume the Galaxy should've outmatched the bugs well over
100 to 1.

5. As noted,
nacelles are thought to be the densest
part of the ship. As such, nacelle masses (previously simply
not calculated) are here darkened a bit. I do not think they
should be used for most purposes. For instance, in the case
of the TOS and TMP era ships, nacelle mass might very well surpass what
is listed for the higher end simply because the high end is calculated
based on the complete mass of an entire TOS ship. In any
case, I leave the figures available merely for interest.

6. The Jem'Hadar
attack ship data is
considered to be more of a guesstimate than an
estimate. The
model of the ship available online resembles the bugs, but is by far
the
least-accurate model used in the chart above.

7. The
Tac-Fighter is the fighter used by
Starfleet and the Maquis . . . it is not the "Maquis
Raider" or the Peregrine. The
full-size raider is
the Antares Class, as named in Pathways.
The smaller version used by the Maquis is the Peregrine Class "courier
ship", as Odo describes in "Heart of Stone"[DS9-3].

Everyone calls the Federation fighter the Peregrine.
I kinda like that name, too, even though I'm credited at EAS with the
counterargument (from here
originally). Oops. But, then, it's not my fault the
writers
associated the name Peregrine with a courier ship instead of a fighter.
Oh well, whichever. In any case, here's
the externally lovely model used, converted to SketchUp and with the
interior cleaned up by yours truly. Just a note . . . unless the
fighter has more room than indicated by its Type 15 shuttlepod cabin
(e.g. unless there's some way to 'go below' or a bed behind the cabin
or something), the fighter probably has a higher mass than we might
expect, given that whereas shuttlecraft are large and empty on the
inside, the fighter must be crammed almost full of stuff by comparison.
I'd imagine it probably rivals the Delta Flyer's mass.

8. Deep Space
Nine's width is, in the final analysis, a best guess. DS9's
David
Stipes liked to rescale things for "dramatic" reasons (i.e. laziness),
which is why the station, originally designed at 1,097 meters,
is
sometimes scaled as high as two kilometers and sometimes
scaled as
low as 335 meters (1,097 feet)
compared to the little spacesuited guys in the credits. The
DS9
Tech Manual suggests a compromise of 1,451 meters, but I don't see that
as particularly helpful. Comparing the station to a 120
meter
Defiant, the runabouts on the pad, the Galaxy dockings, and so on, a
figure around 1300 meters seems to work the best in my view.

Here
is a very pretty SketchUp model, though the Promenade windows are way
too big. I had great trouble at first getting the volume from
it . . .
it
gave almost 100,000,000 cubic meters. I
knew this wasn't right, both because of the earlier LightWave model
volume and a more basic approach. For instance, the
station model is 56m thick at the outer docking ring. If we assume that
all of the station's material could be squished into a cylinder of the
DS9TM diameter by 15m height, which seems more or less right by eyeball
estimation, then we'd wind up with a figure of 24,779,464 cubic meters.
That's pretty close to the existing value I had for the station at 1250
meters. So a figure four times that was right out.

I finally determined that the volume estimator plug-in was
having great
trouble with the ring shape of the station, inserting volume estimation
planes right across the empty interior pieces of the station (i.e.
making it a disk rather than a ring). Turning the station on
its side
cures this problem.

I went ahead and gave mass values for DS9, even
though it isn't a starship and is without the heavy nacelles.
On the other
hand, the station has two-meter thick duranium around some of its
conduits
("Captive Pursuit"[DS9-1]), so I figure the mass should indeed fall
somewhere in that range.

Incidentally, the station was, as of
"Sanctuary"[DS9-2], only capable of housing 7,000 people according to
Odo. By the time of "Field of Fire"[DS9-7], over 900
Starfleet
personnel were aboard.

9. The Klingon
Bird-of-Prey has similar
scaling issues to DS9, having been scaled at everything from 50 to over
700 meters in
various
scenes throughout Trek. We know there are various
classes of the
ship, though, which gives a little wiggle room. In
the above, I
assigned the canon names to reasonably-average canon
sizes. The
ship's volume, incidentally, will change a bit depending on the wing
configuration . . . both BOPs were measured with wings flat, not tilted
up or
down. Your mileage (or meterage) may vary.

Here's
a decent-looking Google SketchUp model, but the ship's got some weird
gaps in it (e.g. between the top and bottom halves of the two main
hulls), so its volume reading is considered less accurate.

The Bird-of-Prey is also the source of a unique objection to
this page, in that it is claimed that the BoP from Star Trek IV
was floating or at least partially floating in the San Francisco Bay.
This is incorrect. The central San Francisco Bay
has an average depth
of 13.4 meters, or about as tall as the 110m BoP head section, which
was sitting at an angle out of the water. That actually
makes a
lot of sense for a Bird-of-Prey in flight mode that has had its tail
sink in shallow water. As such, there's no reason to assume
that
the Bird-of-Prey did anything else but sink her butt into the mud right
away.

10. The
Jem'Hadar battlecruiser is commonly
estimated to be something like 600-650 meters.
However, scrutiny of
its first appearance in "In Purgatory's Shadow"[DS9-5] and close
comparison to the attack ship shows that the vessels simply cannot be
that
large, at least in that episode. I haven't seen enough of the
later
seasons to judge the ship's size later, though.

11. Being a
much shorter ship, one might've expected the Miranda to have much less
volume than the
Enterprise-A. However, the large four-deck-high
extension on the
rear of the saucer does much to offset the issue, though that and the
torpedo
"roll bar" do cause the ship's surface area to be rather high (hence
the low value for its V/SA ratio). The same sort of
thing occurs
with the Nebula, whose pod severely increases the surface area while
providing
little volume, giving the total ship about half the V/SA of the Galaxy
Class.

12.
The original Warbird model as used on this site was a really
crappy looking
Lightwave model. This SketchUp model is far
superior in appearance, but leaky as hell. As soon as I can
get it repaired I'll be using its volume instead.

13.
It's interesting to see that there was
such a sudden jump in
ship volumes around the TMP era. The Constellations and
Excelsiors are
both over three times as large as the Constitution. To be
fair, both have
about twice the Constitution nacelle volume, thanks to
the Constellations' four
engines and the big huge engines of the Excelsiors. Still, though,
the Excelsior A minus nacelles is 4.86 the volume of the Constitution
A. And the Excelsior (minus nacelles) is almost half again as
voluminous as theConstellation (minus four Constitution B nacelles).

It's also
curious to note that the only other ship design of that era, the Soyuz
Class,
should also have an interior volume substantially greater than the
Constitutions.

The
Constellation Class was described by Picard as underpowered, though of
course that was some 75 years after the initial appearance of the
class, a class which was not seen upgraded as some Excelsiors were
(e.g. the Lakota).

14.
The
NX Class is disturbingly big compared to the
Constitution. She has
about 94% of the volume of the Constitution, which is bad
enough. However,
if you add to that the fact that her nacelles take up far less
percentage of
that volume, you come to realize that the useful internal volume of the
NX Class
is actually greater than that of the later Connie!

Fortunately, the NX has a crew of just 80 instead
of the 203 of the 2250's Constitutions. This allows us to
assume that the
ship's inner mechanics . . . propulsion, life support, et cetera . . .
actually
take up a far greater percentage of the available volume than on the
later
ships. Nonetheless, a less-voluminous design (read:
"Daedalus") would've been
preferred.

15. A SketchUp TOS Connie,
when rescaled, comes out to 216,000 cubic meters. My ST-v-SW Connie
volume is 211,000. Given that the SketchUp volume plug-in has
accuracy settings (in this case, 5%),
that's pretty damn close, representing a difference of just over two
percent. I consider that more than close enough to consider
the old Connie value confirmed.

16. The Super
Star Destroyer model employed (via LightWave) was somewhat
iffy.
But, then, the cityscape on
the top is difficult to model correctly, and given its massive,
voluminous bulk any tiny difference will show up as the equivalent of
several smaller starships. So, your mileage may vary here.
That said, however, this SketchUp model
gives a very similar value at 12,955,000,000 or so. I'm not
worried because that's just a 2% difference . . . which is just scary,
since that 2% is the equivalent of a few Star Destroyers.

17. I had found
several other Acclamator models before finally finding this excellent one
that's light-years better than the others, at least in shape . . . who
knew I needed to search for "Eclamator"? I'd love
to get a
true count of troop carrying capacity.

18.
The ISD volume on this page was in error for a great long
while,
but is fixed now. (I originally had 53,942,400.)

You'll
want to be careful of leaky or otherwise poorly finished Star Destroyer
models, since for some reason Star Destroyer mesh makers are some of
the worst in that regard. Hand calculation can be tricky,
too,
given that it's tempting to simply
calculate based on a pyramid for the main hull and assume that most of
the bridge tower and superstructure can fit into the gaps.
But,
even small variations in the proportion estimates can make for massive
variations in the final product, and the Star Destroyers are frequently
the topic of misinformation as to their proportions. (See 18a
below!)

This
is why assorted hand calculations for the ISD volume (such as some at
StarfleetJedi or even some on SDN (e.g. 55 million argued by Surlethe))
frequently appeared to confirm the old value. So, when a
SketchUp
model here
(one of my first uses of the plugin) read about 45 million cubic
meters, and with many hand-calced estimates supporting my earlier
figure, all seemed to be well. (Besides which, that was the
highest volume I could get out of any of the leaky Star Destroyer
models! )

But, there was a reasonable doubt, so I continued to
pursue it. Further analysis and exhaustive refit and repair
of
another model (especially once I realized that the SketchUp plugin is a
little finicky) confirmed that the old volume was too low.
But that model was
not 100% perfect either, nor ws it even terribly close to such even
after my hours of revisions (undertaken since the model was "easiest"
to fix, without realizing its proportions were so badly off).

Using this model
and altering its proportions to match the TESB-style ISDs results in a
very close match when overlaid against film images. Thus, the
volume should be reasonably accurate now.

18a. For reference, assuming a
Star Destroyer 1609 meters long, a Star Destroyer of the Avenger type
as seen in TESB should be approximately 821
meters wide and with a primary hull dagger some 202 meters tall,
based
purely on near-orthographic scenes from the film (e.g. the front-on
view of the Falcon chase, or the bottom view during the collision
scene, et cetera).

However, others claim different figures. Such
problems come from various sources, mostly related to using assorted
non-canong drawings rather than the completed film. Also,
however, is the fact that there's more than one correct value.
You see, the ISD model for Episode IV and the one made for
Episode V (commonly
referred to as the Devastator model and the Avenger model,
respectively) have differing proportions in addition to different
detail work. The smaller Devastator model, which had to be
replaced ... a victim of its own success insofar as wowing the audience
with hugeness and intricacy ... is commonly said to be proportionately
wider.

On this page,
you can see images linked to above the text "Ventral views of the
Devastator". Most everyone seems to use the first image for
width,
which is odd since the model is missing pieces and has odd shadows and
whatnot. Also odd is that the first image shows a model that
is too
wide, her width some 63.26% of her length. This is the source
of the
width estimates of around 1015
meters (about 63% of 1609). However, the second and third
images (the blueprints and a model shot) seem to agree on a ship around
915 meters
wide, or 56.74% as
wide as long. This is especially interesting given that
the model shot shows the finished model (albeit flipped
port/starboard), unlike the first image. It seems likely,
then,
that the 63% value is far too much.

Even high-quality and revered fan reconstructions differ from
the film ship. The "fractalsponge"
mesh of an ISD, for instance, is amazing to behold. However,
if
you overlay with transparency scaled to the bridge tower from the
almost-directly-front view of the ISD with the Falcon in front of it
from TESB, it's clear the mesh is far too wide. True, it's a
film
perspective view versus a perfect orthagonal projection, but the bridge
towers being in the rear make it a reasonable comparison. But
even simply scaled to the widest points of the primary hull, the
primary hull dagger is too tall. The reason for this is that
fractalsponge developed his model based on the Devastator and shots of
it like the excessively-wide one from Curtis Saxton's site, adjusting
details to make it resemble the Avenger but doing none of the
proportion changes required.

Similarly, the scratchbuilt four-foot model here
is based on popular EU drawings that peg the ship in the 885
meter width range 55%, somewhat close to the original Devastator but
still another distinct value. Suffice it to say that for a
vessel
with such a generally simple shape, it is really one of the most
confusing ships out there, judging from all the differing opinions.

Also, just as a reference note, bear in mind that
the Avenger dagger's top half (as measured from the middle of the
ship's trenching)
is of a greater height than the bottom half by about 17.986 percent . .
. that is to say, the dagger shape's not symmetrical in regards to top
and bottom.

19. The
Falcon volume has been altered from its earlier value, based on an
unknown LightWave model. As with the ISD, rim thickness is the
main factor in estimating the volume correctly . . . a rim just a bit
too thick can drive up the volume substantially. The current
value is based on this model, which fits quite well with the ship shown in this article.
The model volume was calculated based on a ship a little over 35
meters long, but given that the model is missing all the extra
greeblies and whatnot this figure is probably about right.

20.
The Munificent is a curiously empty vessel.
Watching TCW carefully, you'll note that the forward dorsal
hull's outline is largely composed of big pieces of metal hanging out
in space doing nothing beyond being external shield walls.
Very odd ship. But here's a pretty model of it.
With some tweaks to get all the assorted details to read
right
in with the SketchUp plugin, one can get the value above . . . but that
reading is based on the external shield walls having no volume
whatsoever (which is good, since the aft ones are not connected to the
ship at all). As seen in TCW, the metal pieces can
be
knocked off with no apparent leaks or fires or anything else occuring,
suggesting that they aren't even used as gastanks or anything . . .
just external shield walls.

So, for mass purposes, I would bump
things up a bit, since I'd imagine the ship's volume is smaller in
comparison to her mass than would be the case for most Star Wars ships,
which don't have goofy shield walls hanging out all over the place.

21.
The Monsterprise (the 2009 movie Enterprise) is included here
only for the sake of curiosity. It's called
Constitution Class by some materials, but this is confusing with the
real Trek universe. Hence "Alternate-Reality Consitution", or
Altstitution. (Substitution Class might work as well.)
But
in any case, if you take the TMP-era Enterprise and scale her up to 762
meters, the ship's volume would be about 3.66 million cubic meters, and
3.87 for the TOS Enterprise. Per this SketchUp model,
a 762 meter Monsterprise reads 2,824,395 at 5%, but that's only about
half the proper value for some reason. For now I've removed
the
readings and I'll try to get the correct volume when I'm done with more
important vessels.

Incidentally,
the Kelvin (which, contrary to some erroneous claims, is also an
alternate reality ship) is supposed to be 1500 feet long, or 457
meters. That would give it a volume of 989,000 cubic meters,
per this model, which seems at least
roughly accurate. The Kelvin's size would
make
it about as long as the Excelsior ("My god, that's a big ship"), and
with greater volume.

Also
contrary to common claims, the Narada is not a ship we should expect to
see in the normal Trek universe . . . the 2387 timeline from the JJ
Abrams film is not presented as the same as 'our' 2387.

22. The
very pretty Munificent model I measured to within 5% gave me a volume
of 2,137,120 cubic meters. A simple Venator model at the same accuracy
nets me 10,616,929 cubic meters . . . a difference of almost five
times, despite the ships being only 1130 vs. 830 meters (the Muni's
shorter). (For reference, the Muni's volume is less than a Sovereign
Class Federation starship, and she's 130 meters longer . . . we all
know how sleek and spindly the Sovereigns are.)

Given that much
of the Venator volume is composed of carrier-related space, though,
she's really a big empty ship. If we assume half of her volume is
dedicated to fighters, then the ship's only about 2.5 times the volume
of the Muni, which (in concert with life support and other humanoid
crew requirements) gets us closer to understanding the combat ratio
from TCW.

23. The Invisible Hand is superior to the
Munificent insofar as having interior space, but remains a somewhat
smallish design for Star Wars.

24. Yes, I know
the AT-AT
is not a ship. But
as big as it is it might as well be. However, the mass is
probably off some, since the mass of an AT-AT is constrained by the
snow and ice of Hoth. It's a question of ground pressure.
Consider that, per the model, the round part of the feet is
3.862
meters wide for a 22.5 meter AT-AT (the toes are left out).
The
area of one foot is thus 11.7143 square meters, and the area of three
feet (assuming one foot at a time moves) is 35.143 square meters.
A 615 ton AT-AT would thus put up to 17.50 tons per square
meter
on those three feet (ignoring center-of-mass issues and whatnot).
That's 171.62 kilopascals, or 24.9 psi.

Per
an unsourced Wikipedia entry, the human foot is 55kPa, a tank is 103,
an SUV is 170, and a horse is also 170kPa. A passenger car
might
end up at 205kPa. Given that Luke and the AT-AT were sinking
or
not sinking into the snow pretty much identically, we might prefer an
AT-AT somewhere closer to 55kPa. That would limit us to
somewhere below 200 tonnes. (One could presume that antigravs
were involved, but if so then there would've been no need to send
walkers . . . simple fighters or speeder-type vehicles would've been
much faster.)

26. Here's the SketchUp of the small Republic cruiser
known commonly as the Consular Class. This is the type of
ship that took Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan to Naboo in the beginning of TPM,
and has been seen in TCW. The bridge module of the model is
a little bit off, but I'd consider the ship to be generally quite
accurate.

The
usable volume of the ship is quite a bit smaller than the value given,
considering that something like a third of the ship is engine.

27. A wonderful
looking Jem'Hadar battleship model here.
The volume seems to work out well for the 1500m ship, given
that
it is much meatier than the big open Romulan Warbird. Both
ships
are at 5% accuracy.

28.
The Vulcan Suurok Class is described as the Surak and Sh'ran
classes at EAS and even DITL, but the episode script and
closed-captioning call the
class Suurok, and I see no need to split the classes of the two CGI
models used. The first CGI model simply wasn't as good for
close-ups, so a new one was made, albeit with minor differences.
The impulse drive, most notably, goes from a TOS-shuttle
style of
rows to a TMP-esque dual shape . . . I prefer to think of it as the
Suurok A and Suurok B classes, if one must make a distinction.
The window rows are virtually identical in any case.

The presence
of a vessel almost as long as a Galaxy Class and almost exactly as
voluminous as an Akira in the 2150's Vulcan fleet seemed odd
when it first appeared, and still can. Perhaps the class was
the
"Spruce Goose" of its age . . . possible, but unnecessary and not
economical (perhaps especially without efficient Vulcans running it).

29.
The Krenim Temporal Weapon-ship is a one-off design that was
erased from history, but nonetheless is such an interesting vessel that
I had to add it. The model is here.

30. The Daedalus
here
is
almost a perfect match with side schematics at Ex Astris. A
quick
perusal of 3DS or LW ships available online suggests they are not so
perfect, and thus I have replaced the older, smaller volume value.
I don't mind much either
way,
given the voluminous NX Class.

However, I note that primarily to
point out that my 175 meter length is yet another different value.
Official stats for the Daedalus put it at 105 meters, which
is
too tiny. Bernd at Ex Astris did a window analysis strongly
suggesting 180 meters. But, concerned about the ship looking
bigger than the Constitution and concerned about its nacelles being
proportionally too small, he dropped it to 140 as a compromise.
And DaedalusClass.com argues for a 160m ship, which is presumably a
compromise-compromise.

As for me, given the tiny
nacelles of the NX Class I can't see disregarding the windows on that
basis. And given the huge-mongous-ness of ships like the
Vulcan
Suurok or even the Andorian Kumari Class, large ships in the 2100s
don't bother me quite so badly. In
any case, at 175 meters, the ship is basically the same as the 180
meter ship (it's a 2.8% difference in length), but it shaves the volume
nicely.

31. The
combined Prometheus is a good-looking ship, but it is my least favorite
design
simply because it's so wank-tastic given the "multi-vector" nonsense.
But that's Berman and
Braga for you. The designer, Sternbach, was following orders,
and he followed them
well. That said, the tiny nacelle pair on the saucer does
look especially silly,
which is extra-ironic given that the saucer is the most voluminous
section of the ship. The mini-nacelles are about as large as
an entire runabout, but even Voyager's tiny nacelles are enormous
monsters by comparison. I suppose we can presume that either
there are extra supporting warp-sustaining doodads on the hull, or that
the
mini-nacelles are going nuts when active and have a very short service
life (e.g. hours), or that the ship can't go to warp by itself, or
perhaps all three of those or some combination of such options (or
similar). But that makes the destruction of the center
section even more of a problem than it already would've been.

The SketchUp model by "Pagan" is here.
The new volume value
replaces the older value of 769,670 cubic meters.
That value was probably based on the original LightWave
model
which was converted to 3D Studio Max format and available online (e.g.
at the now-defunct Star Trek: Australia website). Nob Akimoto
probably used that one, and I managed to find a copy of it ... SketchUp
will import .3ds files. Comparing the two, I found both to
be
off compared to the CGI model . . . parallel renderings were shown in
Star Trek: The Magazine and are available at EAS. The Pagan
model was closest, but the saucer dimensions were too large.
Thus, the volumes you see here are of my unpublished model
revisions ... I had to reproportion the model saucer section.
This resulted in the upper neck connection not quite
working as well (I didn't get too complex with my reproportion job),
but does make a much closer match than the old .3ds model.
The
surface area is of the original model ... it should still be reasonably
accurate.

The length of 414.5 comes from Rick Sternbach (1360ft.),
corresponding closely to the EAS length. Lengths for each
section are simply measured from the revised Pagan model.

The
vessel when combined is almost certainly quite a bit heavier than
vessels of comparable size, given the extra hull mass and additional
replication of parts.

32.
The New Orleans volume is a little low. The model
available online has a shortened engineering hull which connects
further back on the saucer and does not extend back quite as far.

33. There's a
Cardassian Galor model here with bad volume, but
comparing with the CGI
available at the Drex Files, the model proportions are off . . . the
main hull is squished down pretty well, which probably contributes
strongly to the tiny deflector/weapon emplacement that is a short
rectangle on the model, but should be a square.

You can find a less accurate Runabout here,
and from what I can tell that's a SketchUp import of the 3D Studio
model (also available in LightWave) found elsewhere online.
However, that model has proportions that do not match the DS9
Tech Manual top and side views available on EAS, and aren't the same as
what we would expect from the show. The nacelles are skinnier
and
riding higher than the bottom of the fuselage, for instance, along with
other inaccuracies. (Of course, that model was probably made
before the DS9TM or any other schematic views came out, so it's quite
forgivable. That said, the DS9TM views are also wrong, but close.
The nacelles are kicked back a couple of feet in the 4-view compared to the model itself.)

As such, I have replaced the old 542m³ value with the better
SketchUp Danube's volume.

35.
The Nova Class is often scaled at around 150 meters based on
a
computer screen comparison of the ships in "Equinox, Pt. I"[VOY5].
However, the computer screen (often identified as an MSD
comparison) was actually in 3-D form, and folks seldom seem to
recognize the offset between the two vessels on that screen (the
Equinox was a bit behind Voyager). A more careful look
(which
corresponds nicely with the exterior view) shows that the Equinox was a
little longer than is commonly thought, being long enough that if the
sterns are both at zero, her nose extended almost all the way to the
forwardmost bottom of Voyager's engineering hull (under the deflector
dish). That's more like 180 meters, give or take, which
happens
to correspond nicely to Bernd's EAS estimate of the ship's length based
on window rows.

The A-type and B-type Novae are scaled to the
same points on the hull and are based on a 180 meter A-type.
The
B-type's extra nose resulted in a total length a hair under six meters
longer. Given the smaller saucer deflector on the B-type, I
actually rather doubt that the mass is signficantly greater than the
A-type, if at all. Her density should be close to Voyager's
given that the Nova A-type was intended for planetary research, and
both types seem to have landing leg doors. Note that the
B-type
Nova's surface area is a guesstimate based on the A-type.

The SketchUp models by Pagan of the Equinox and Rhode Island have replaced the
earlier model, which appeared to be excellent but perhaps a little
pudgy in places.

36.
The Romulan Bird of Prey of the 2150's has potential scaling
confusion. The TOS BoP of a century later is often assumed to
be
in the
130m range, but opinions vary widely on the ENT BoP. Scaling
from the two rows of saucer-edge windows gives 260 meters assuming 3m
decks (as DITL does), making it longer than Enterprise. On
the
other hand, the same concept applied to the windows near the saucer top
results in an even worse hugeness in the 430 meter range, since those
windows are closer together. On the other hand, if we assume
the
saucer thickness must represent at least two decks, then giving 6
meters for that entire height (thus assuming a somewhat
non-standardized window placement) gives us 163 meters.
Coincidentally, this is very close to the 165m from a
backstage
scaling diagram Rob Bonchune onceposted, though he implied that
they would alter scales to make the shots look 'better'. The
two
window rows near the saucer top still don't enjoy that value, though,
and we
would have to assume some funny business for the windows in that area.

However,
the corridor heights seen on the Romulan vessel from "Babel
One"[ENT4] are pretty tiny . . . probably not much more than 7 feet, if
that. Giving some wiggle room and making it 7.5 feet (2.286m), scaling
the saucer-edge window rows from that gives us 198.6 meters for the
length of the ship. 200 meters it is, then.

37.
The Klingon Bird of Prey of the 2150's is also a scaling
pain.
One of the better occasions for scaling to occur was the
Augment
arc. Yet "Borderland"[ENT4] suggests a BoP around half the
length
of Enterprise (~115m), though given the much thinner neck section this
would start to cause structural and transit problems. In
"Cold
Station 12"[ENT4] we get to see a Denobulan vessel interior
and
exterior along with entry into the Bird of Prey's shuttlebay (a
shuttlebay!) . . . and the ship seems it must be 200 meters long.

Given
the presence and plot requirement of a shuttlebay, and the fact that
even a short one as shown requires a ship of a decent size, my
temptation is to split the difference, which would be about 160 meters,
very close to three quarters the length of Enterprise at 169 meters
(and satisfying the old TNG-era "alien ship is 3/4s the length of the
Enterprise" quasi-rule).
So, right around those figures gives us 165 meters.
That's
enough for the neck structure to have four and a half meters or so to
work with for corridor and such, and gives a 5 meter tall shuttlebay
door (give or take).

The
rather less clumsy and more slender-looking Bird of Prey from the 23rd
and 24th Centuries would, if 165 meters long, give a volume of 136,300
cubic meters.

38. I thought the funny ringship USS Enterprise
had no readily discernible length. I therefore simply scaled it based
on
the rough minimum requirement for a guy to be able to float or travel
crouched down the central neck tube, and even the tube itself was no
real guide given that (a) this was just the tube diameter some guy
picked when making a model of the ship, and (b) there's no reason to
assume anyone could inhabit the tube anyway. Images from the
paintings of the vessel seemed to show a more slender neck tube in any
case, which would drive up the length (but not the volume).

But as it happens, there are actual blueprints of the ship. On the Drex Files blog,
commenter Vahmp shared some wonderful blueprints by Matt Jefferies for
the ringship, which had originally been part of an unused television
concept. The ship in the blueprints scales out to about 395 feet,
or 120 meters. However, I will wait to update the information
given on the site pending further work with the model itself.
Thanks Vahmp!

The
vessel mass provided above is nothing more than a wild guess, even beyond the length issue. The ship was
certainly built before 2143 and presumably built after 2063, in which
case it should be made of more modern-day materials and hence ought to
be quite a bit lighter. But that depends in part on her
origins.
For instance, the ship could be a human vessel built around
some
old Vulcan or other found warp coils, which would put it existing
anytime in that 80 year span. Or it could be a human attempt
to
copy Vulcan warp methodology, leading us down the garden path for
awhile until we finally figured out that Cochrane's way was the way to
go (which would explain why it took 80 years to pass warp two with
nacelle-based warp drive). Or it could even be a completely
separate government-sponsored warp drive experiment, much like Samuel
Langley's government-sponsored flight attempts that failed while the
Wright Brothers succeeded. That might suggest a very light
ship
for its size. Or some combination of these.

Or it may have
nothing to do with warp drive at all, and instead may be some
experiment on (or vessel using an early version of)
subspace-driver-coil-driven drive products (or even some 'lower tech'
magnetic ion-drive-related technology), as suggested by the big honking
pillar of fire coming out the backside in most images. It
may
simply be a pre-warp vessel from the completely different timeline that
had featured the Nomad probe and Eugenics Wars and other such things.

In short, we'll never know, and the sky's the limit.

39.
The freighter listed here is the rather standard Norkova /
Xhosa
type. I would wager that this is the Type 2
Freighter compared to the Type 1 of the Batris configuration, whoever
the manufacturer may be. In
any case, the model (obtained from a Klingon Academy mod)
required extensive modification to make it work for volume calculation,
and one large piece of equipment (the round thing on the upper portside
structure) is missing from the final model as measured.
Nonetheless, the value above accurately relates to the main
hull's configuration.

Given that this is a freighter, chances are
good the mass values are too heavy for the ship itself (I imagine it's
built light), but may be accurate with the inclusion of cargo.

40.
The Aerowing or aeroshuttle is the Intrepid Class Captain's
Yacht, never seen or hinted at in Voyager (implying Voyager's wasn't
there). It's the obvious runabout-esque ship shape on the
underside of the Intrepid saucer. The model
used is based on renders that never made it to the screen.
While
not strictly canon in its entirety, we've seen the bottom of it and the
top is plausible enough, though from a real-world view it would still
make more sense if they'd simply hard-docked a Danube there and thus
spared themselves the expense of another ship design. So,
take
this one with the appropriate grain of salt.

41. The Romulan Scout
is one of my favorite Romulan ship designs. The model is very
basic, but with some modification it worked fine. I find it
odd,
though, that a ship so large (larger than an Antares and almost half
the volume of the Defiant) is so often seen with just one person
aboard. Then again, in the early TNG era small crew counts
were
the norm, what with all those low-crew Mirandas running about.

43.
Previous versions of this page featured a 50% mass reduction
for
the mushroom type starbases. However, I'm leaving the full
values
there at present, but if it were me I'd halve them at least before use.
For instance, Spacedock is probably an expensive starbase,
but I
rather doubt it's worth 26,000 Constitution Class starships by volume.
Then again, even if it's only worth a third of that, it's
still
8500 ships, which is not terribly far from the number of ships in the
Starfleet of the 24th Century.

44. Commonly
known as the Romulan shuttle but which is sufficiently large to be
runabout size, the mesh available here
took forever to fix up enough for the volume plugin to work upon it
correctly. That said, despite being a very simple model in
basic
shape, the representation is quite good.

46. I approve of
the Twilight
in principle, but it's just about the only Star Wars vessel with the
primary thrust being unquestionably way off the centerline.
That's a shame . . . only Trek was doing silly stuff like
that
before (though even then not quite to the Twilight's extent!).

47.
I rather like the Republic Light Cruiser, even though some of
its
Star Destroyer-inspired design features (like the hints of
superstructure around the bridge tower, not to mention the bridge tower
itself) are kind of silly for a ship that small. It basically
looks like a Falcon front end got mated to a Consular rear end with
Star Destroyer pieces in the middle, but it still works somehow.
I just hope we get a better name for it at some point.
It
was identified by Separatists as a vessel of an escort class, but they
lumped it in with three smaller Consulars to make that statement.
The vessel length is a rough estimate on my part.
It could
easily be 150 meters if the structure of the model I used is any guide, but
it looked a little bit bigger to me in comparison with the Consulars
trailing it.

48.
The Tantive IV, "galactic cruiser" and "blockade runner" per
the
ANH novelization and script, respectively, has a remarkably large
volume when compared to the slightly longer, much wider Republic Light
Cruiser above. I was worried for a moment after adding the
Republic Light Cruiser that something was wrong, until I remembered
just how absurdly huge the engine cluster is on the Tantive type.
Then I relaxed.

49. The Kumari
was the topic of this blog post
on the difficulties of getting some of these models to perform well
when under volumetric scrutiny. After having already expended
enormous time cleaning out the innards ofa "fat-bottom" Kumari with a
very large aft section and a taller head, I finally bit the bullet and
fought against the innards of the best looking mesh I could find
(when compared to Doug Drexler's orthographic views), and that's
the result.

50. The
excellent Type-7 here
shocked me at first with its large size compared to other shuttles, but
it is accurate. Unexpected that it's 9 times the volume of a
shuttlepod, though.

51.
The Type-15 model
is very good. Estimating the volume for this one by eyeball
proved quite a ways off, too . . . I didn't think it would go above
7.

52. Took awhile to get a working Raven model . . .
the one obtained from the now-defunct Star Trek: Australia site and credited to SciFi-Art does not perfectly correspond to the EAS depiction, but it is
adequate.

53. The NX shuttlepod I found required extensive
reworking. Starting with the structure of this low-poly Bridge Commander model that was basically a hexagonal bullet,
altering the proportions and heavily reworking the nose, windshield,
and upper rear (the model as built relied heavily on texturing to
'cheat' the appearance of correct structure), I tried to make the
vessel correspond fairly well to Raul Quiles' five-view here
and to my own eyeball
appraisal, and I somehow found a length of about 8 meters
initially. But, thanks as always to Flare, where an official
length of 6.9 meters was noted as having come from the 2010 Haynes tech
manual. After further
review and additional comparison with the Doug Drexler renders of the
actual CGI model as shared by Bernd, the suggested height for a 6.9m
shuttlepod appears to better correspond with the practical set compared
to
the actors and their known heights.

My goal is to modify the model
further to more precisely match the Drexler renders before providing
updated volume figures. Given my current rate of progress,
hopefully I will get that done sometime in 2015.

54.
The Kazon Predator / Kazon Carrier / Kazon Mothership (the name
depends on who you ask) is a big enormous beast, and has been due for
inclusion on this page since 2003 when it was first requested (the request was fulfilled in just under seven years). The model used
is imprecise compared to the EAS depiction (the upper hull is too
short, the lower face too deep), and would require extensive rebuilding
to match perfectly. However, it is generally accurate and most of
the problem areas either cancel out or leave the size a little low,
which I'm okay with for the time being.

55. TOS Romulan Bird of Prey information per my rationale in this thread and a cleaned out version of this model
(rather difficult given the modeled bird going all the way through the
ship, but eventually do-able). I used to have the Romulan Bird of
Prey from TOS in the 131 meter ballpark, but I just don't think that's
so anymore, as noted in the thread linked.

Interestingly, this
implies that the habit of Romulans to have larger ships than what the
Federation was sending to greet them started as early as TOS, given
that the 192 meter Bird of Prey is twice the volume of the Constitution
Class. Given the cat and mouse of "Balance of Terror", it's
amusing to ponder that it was a rather big mouse.

56. Considering that the Y-Wing
is bigger than an X-Wing even without the Clone Wars-era extra fairings
and whatnot, yet is evidently a functional fighter, one wonders what's
missing.

57. Deep Space Station K-7 . . . pretty nice little model, here.
It's a fairly simple design, a triradial design like DS9, but it
looks tiny and a little silly by comparison. One thing I still
don't get is how (or if) you can actually dock with the thing.

58. I can't believe I forgot to add the Borg until mid-2010.

In
any case, the cube gets a perfect score on volume coefficient
(surprise, surprise), and the sphere gets the perfect score on volume
by surface area (surprise, surprise). As with the Death Stars,
though, both of those values are simple calculation from the basic
shape, not a true figure. The outer surface of the sphere, for
instance, is so gnarly with greebles that the true figure would be
less.

The sphere's estimated diameter comes from "Regeneration"[ENT2], when a
human scientist estimates the size of a crashed sphere based on the
curvature of the outer hull debris.

The
volume of the cube is taken from the direct statement in "Dark
Frontier"[VOY5], and the length of the vessel is calculated from that.
Assuming 28 cubic kilometers was a round up or round down, the
true volume would likely be anywhere from around 27.5 to 28.49, with
the length thus working out to a range of about 3,018 to 3,054 meters.

Interestingly,
given its size the tactical performance of the Borg Cube is not
terribly impressive. By volume, the cube is worth 4800 Galaxy
Class ships, and 32,000 Excelsiors. Even by surface area alone,
the cubes equal a thousand Galaxies at least. And yet in First
Contact, Starfleet (with only a little targeting help) was able to
destroy a cube, and so far as we know they didn't experience even Wolf
359-level losses, which by volumetric measure were exceptionally light.

Presumably
this explains the origin of the tactical cube, which might be nothing
more than an uparmored cube that's designed to keep better pace in
regards to a firepower-to-volume ratio . . . or so we might say, but
for the fact that Voyager tangled with one twice for minutes at a time
and lived to tell the tale. Some theorize that the tactical cube
was damaged or otherwise in poor condition, which makes more sense.

One impressive thing is the Borg Sphere being knocked out by four quantum torpedoes in First Contact .
. . despite being worth 129 Excelsiors (or almost 47 Sovereigns), the
quantums took out huge (~50m) chunks of the sphere before the entire
ship exploded.

B.
Tips and Tricks for the DIY Volume Calculation Guy

1.
SketchUp

1. There is an update to the Volume Calculation
plugin for SketchUp,
but you don't want a version beyond 1.8 because the code was changed in
2.0 . . . this made it faster, but less able to deal with complex
shapes (like starships).

2.
After running, the plugin asks if you want to hide the ship.
You do,
because then it will show you the volume section planes, which should
be evenly spaced and thus allow
you to make sure of what it has actually calculated. Many
ships,
for instance, will seem to have a volume reported that is too low, or
in the case of DS9 too high. Checking the section planes can
allow you
to see if the plugin missed a section of ship (as often occurs with a
poorly-built model mesh) or is adding something extra.

If
you're
feeling especially frisky and the volume can be calculated quickly, you
can turn up the accuracy to see exactly where the leak or other problem
is occurring. Also, turning a starship around on its axes
can be
helpful when trying to get the volume plugin to calculate a ship
correctly, or to find the leak. Last but not least, running
the
volume plugin and then running it again with the ship (and grouped
volume section planes) at a different orientation can be a good fix of
last resort when you just can't get a ship to stop leaking.

3. As with most model volume measurement tools, the
interior of the
mesh should, ideally, be free of junk. Of course, as hinted
at above, you'll find that
almost nobody doing sci-fi mesh work bothers to clean out the interior
of the ship mesh when it's done, so you may find yourself learning how
to
delete things.

In
SketchUp, selecting the whole ship in
non-group form and intersecting all of its parts will allow you to
start cleaning out the interior. You'll also want to make
sure
that no
faces are reversed (i.e. outer surfaces pointed inward), though this
may not be as critical depending on different factors . . . I've been
doing it anyway, though. It can be helpful when trying to do
that
to change the style settings so that face sides strongly contrast one
another (but not to the point where the color hurts your eyes after
extended viewing). Bright interior color can also help,
though,
for looking around a model to see if there are any gaps. If
so,
you may find yourself having to connect the dots or, in the case of a
very poor model, doing a little refit and repair work.

2.
Blender

1. Instructions on how to calculate volumes using a
Python script for Blender can be found here.